What happens when reality catches up to science fiction? Well, you just might have hit the Jackpot. Welcome to the Implausipod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. In today's episode, we're going to return to our main timeline and discuss The Peripheral, the new science fiction series on Amazon Prime, based on the 2014 science fiction novel by William Gibson.

We've mentioned William Gibson before in relation to some of our Westworld episodes, as well as in our Cyberpunk 101 in episode three. And while the series has already diverged from the novel in several significant ways, we're going to focus on the series as presented on Amazon rather than the novel itself. And also I wanna stress out of the gate that this is not a recap show for any new listeners or those who are following just because of The Peripheral coverage. Similar to what we did with Westworld, we're talking about the themes and elements in the show, both the technology and the culture, as well as the social elements and tying them to our own situation.

As we've mentioned before, in I think episodes three and four, science fiction is always set in the future, but is discussing the elements in our present and sometimes in our history as well. It uses the future as a means to step back and detach from the present situation and look at those elements that we have real problems sometimes discussing through an alternative lens, but as The Peripheral is a new series, and I don't think nearly as many people have read the novel as have watched the first two episodes, we will recap some elements in this podcast simply for necessity's sake, and for the remainder of the series we'll try and keep up with the episodes as they're being released. Amazon Prime released the first two episodes of the series on October 21st, 2022, and this is being recorded on October 23rd, so we'll cover elements from both those episodes.

So with introductions out of the way, let's get to it: in the not-too-near-distant future in the heartland of America, where it's been hollowed out by years of recession and wars and, you know, late stage capitalism, we meet a couple of siblings, Flynn and Burton, who are taking care of the family homestead somewhere in the middle of America.  Burton isn't living in the house. He's in a van down by the river, and spends his time playing video games on something that looks like a VR headset, a Valve index, or Meta oculus, several generations in the future. These ones connect directly to their phones, and interestingly enough, they look like it'd actually be usable.  The screens are able to retract when not in use and rolling up into the rim, and otherwise it just looks like a, some really thick but functional ski goggles, and honestly, I'm here for it. One of the things with VR Tech in every instance that has actually been made is that it's been very clunky and a little bit difficult to operate, and getting through that difficulty has been one of the things that have really, you know, slowed down its adoption. So if we see a visual representation of VR that looks like it can actually be implemented, but also, you know, be usable, then, you know, we may see more widespread adoption now. 

The show is set about 10 years in the future in 2032, so it's explicitly mentioned. Would we get there in 10 years? I don't know, but it'd be interesting to see. Burton is playing video games for cash, helping escort rich whales through difficult sections of a game, and he asked his sister Flynn to sit in for him for a second while using his ID and profile, and it's this that is the inciting incident for the rest of the series, and what the series is about becomes a little bit more clear in the second episode, Empathy bonus. 

And so we're gonna jump around a little bit, and as I said, this isn't a recap per se, because what the book is about and what I believe the show will be about too, because Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, the executive producers of this, have had success in adapting with Gibson's works to screen before, what the book and show are asking is: “Are we trapped on our current path? Can you change the path we're on? If you see a dystopia coming or if you're currently living in the dystopia of late capitalism, is there a way out?” So it's really a human question about change and growth and the book itself, (spoilers), can you have a happy ending in a dystopia?

But we're gonna focus less on the happy ending and see how the series progresses and get more into that question about change and growth, because I think that's really the interesting question and the part that's most relevant to us, the audience here in 2022:  are we trapped in a near future where the jobs are mostly gone? Our rural communities are ravaged by opioid epidemics, we have continuing environmental degradation and work and life has shifted online to the extent that most of our communities are really ghost towns and there's no one really present in the third places anymore. Or are there alternatives? And where do those alternatives come from?  Are they generated within or can they come from outside of ourselves? Unfortunately, for us, it looks like we're gonna have to deal with our own problems ourselves, but within the context of the story of The Peripheral, it's really a story about communication because at its heart it's a multiverse story.

Now, I know that's the word to describe media in 2022. We've had the amazing Everything Everywhere All At Once, and then we had the slightly less amazing MCU properties for both Spider-Man and Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. We can look at media properties like Rick and Morty or Fortnite being a pop culture blender of everything being instantiated within those, uh, “battlegrounds”, and The Peripheral is as well. It's the story about two dystopias: a post-apocalyptic London in the year 2100 or approximately thereabouts; and the slightly less post-apocalyptic, but still dystopic Heartland of America in 2032. 

And I wanna stress that those are timelines. There's a little bit of, you know, pop-culture time-travel awareness that kind of goes into these assumptions of the show. It's a little bit of Back to the Future or Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and I think this was kind of glossed over in episode two when Wolf (the Fixer in London) and Lev (the Russian who's bankrolling them) are explaining things to Flynn through her telepresence unit that they're communicating back in time.  And that created a branch in reality, which is Flynn's present, but as Flynn states, it's still real to her. If we're watching the MCU series Loki on Disney Plus, we might call it a variant, but here we're gonna call it a peripheral. Now in the book, it's called a stub, that variant version of reality. In the show Wolf called it a peripheral, but that was actually the telepresence robot that Flynn was using to interact with the future, but we're not gonna get bogged down in the details right now. This is just the central conceit of the show. The Big Lie.

You see every sci-fi series or fantasy series or a lot of modern fiction has one allowed, one big lie. For Star Trek, it's warp travel. For Star Wars, it's that the force exists. And for the MCU, it's that you can have superheroes.  It's where the audience will engage the creators in the willing suspension of disbelief. They say: “Alright. You got one and I'll believe the rest of it.” As long as, you know, it by and large makes sense. There may be some ancillary little lies that go with it, like in Star Trek, the transporters, or you know that there's alien races, but as long as you stick with the big lie and it's consistent, then the audience will go along with you for the ride.  If you try for a second big lie, it might cause them to tune out. For the MCU, for me at least, it was like The Snap that just did not make sense and everything fell apart after, but that's more about me. Regardless, you get the one big lie and within the context of The Peripheral, it's that the future, I mean, sorry, the main timeline, the 2100 London timeline (which is actually the main one) can communicate with a version of the past through a backdoor in a computer, through something they call quantum tunneling in the show (even though quantum tunneling isn't that at all). Just whenever the show says quantum tunneling, just assume it's like a Star Trek “reversing the polarity” or something. It's the mumbo jumbo that makes the rest of it work, but that mumbo jumbos enough.

And so the story is about what happens when the future reaches back to the past, and can be impacted by sending information. They don't have to send much, but the little bit that they do send is enough to have drastic impacts. You can see this in episode two and after the conversation with Flynn, Lev's group sends back the winning lottery numbers to the cast of My Name Is Earl there so they can pick up $250,000 from the state lotto and use that to bankroll their operations. We can also see that in episode one when the competing group sends back that $9 million bounty on Flynn and Burton, so we know there's at least two groups that are able to communicate backwards in time to this alternate variant of the past.

And as they state: that as soon as that initial contact was made, that this is actually branched off and become that variant, that stub, or in the case of the show, the Peripheral. Now through the next six episodes of the show, I'm sure more of this will be revealed, and there's other elements that will come into play, so we're really just focusing on what's been happening in the first few episodes. And one of the things we see is that that information transfer is not just one way. The group from the future is able to send back, say the plans to the 3D printing farm that Flynn works at for the creation of the telepresence unit, the more advanced version of VR. It's a lot more like the matrix connection that allows Flynn to actually pilot the unit in the future. So there's a lot of data interchange going on there, but it's enough for this future-tech to work. Lev’s group has also used that ability to communicate, to do things like set up the Milagros Corporation, which ends up sending the blueprints for the headset interface to the 3D print shop where Flynn works, and that ties directly back to our inciting incident. 

Flynn doing a favor for her brother and picking up the shift to operating the peripheral in the future to accompany Alda during her investigation witnesses something that she shouldn't. Now, obviously the group in the future thought they were dealing with Burton, which is why the peripheral looks like him, but Flynn's piloting it and that makes all the difference. And interestingly enough, that's why the first episode is called “Pilot”, right? It's not the pilot of the program, but it's Flynn-as-pilot in the peripheral in the future. That kind of is the inciting incident, as we mentioned. So a little play on our conventions of having the first episode be a pilot, but that's actually the title. 

The second episode titled “Empathy Bonus” gives us a hint of why Flynn being there and not Burton would make all the difference in the world (or worlds in this case), because Burton's response would've been much different.  As noted when they're discussing the events of the game, when they're recapping it to each other in episode two (for that part that started off at the beginning of episode one), Burton asked, “why would you save the sheep?”  And that's where she got the empathy bonus from. But the game or reality doesn't necessarily work that way. Now, Burton's background is a little bit different. It's only alluded to at the beginning of the first episode when he's, you know, hanging out in the “van down by the river”, but later on when he is drinking beer and chatting with his buddies around the campfire, we kinda get a sense of that.

If you're watching the firefight at the beginning of episode two and you're wondering how the cast of Letterkenny can all of a sudden take on a platoon of Ex-Navy SEAL mercenaries, then well, there's a reason for that. See, Burton and his friends when they were in the military were all a part of a unit called “Haptic Recon”, which means they had some cybernetic enhancements, including in vision and communications, and with one of the squad members using a drone to give them situational awareness of the battlefield, they were able to get a better sense of where everybody was, even though they didn't have like night vision embedded or anything.

And they were able to use that to take out a squad where they were vastly outnumbered. And oddly enough, this is one of the least farfetched things in the show. It doesn't violate our big lie because you see, the US military has actually been working on something like that on and off since 1987. It's called the Land Warrior Project, where they're able to take modern high-tech components and incorporate it with the battlefield kit of the modern soldier.  I mean, it's not that surprising given that the military has had like Starship Troopers on its reading list for about 40 years. I think we detailed that in the prior episode, but that integration of real-world tech into the modern battlefield equipment has been an ongoing thing for quite some time, although the only difference in the show is that they cybered it up a little bit and kind of extrapolated 10 years into the future to give what we saw in the episode. And as we said, it gave our cast of Letterkenny 2077 an outsized advantage. Now, the show has branched off a little bit from the books and it is a little bit different. Whether that's better or worse or just, you know, the adaptation that's made for television in order to a stretch it out a bit, but also just make the story work within the episodic framework of TV or streaming, that's fine. We'll note some of the differences and maybe highlight some of the things that were much more major in the book. One of those is like AL'S work and the mention of the money and the clips that are behind Wil and Lev, but I think more of this will be revealed as the show goes on. So going forward, I hope you join us as we continue our review as the episodes are released on what looks to be a weekly schedule going forward until the final episode on December 2nd. So I hope you join us again next week when we discuss the major themes and elements of episode three. In the meantime, you can reach me at Doctor Implausible at Implausi dot blog or on some of the socials. We will see you in A future.